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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

French regulators have said Skype could face prosecution for failing to register as an “electronic communications operator” with France’s telecom regulator. The agency, known by its French acronym ARCEP, wrote in anEnglish-language statementon Tuesday that “failure to comply with this obligation does, however, constitute a criminal offense.”

Being an operator that provides telecom services to the public “also implies compliance with certain obligations, which include the routing of emergency calls and implementing the means required to perform legally ordered [wiretap] interceptions," according to ARCEP.

A technical glitch in the core Bitcoin software forced developers to call for a temporary halt to Bitcoin transactions, sparking a sharp sell-off. The currency's value briefly fell 23 percent to $37 before regaining much of its value later in the evening.

The core of the Bitcoin network is a shared transaction register known as the blockchain. Approximately every 10 minutes, a new block is created containing a record of all Bitcoin transactions that occurred since the previous block. Nodes in the network, known as miners, race to "discover" this next block by solving a cryptographic puzzle. The winner of this race announces the new block to the other nodes. The other nodes verify that it complies with all the rules of the Bitcoin protocol and then accepts it as the next official entry in the block chain, starting the race anew.

It's essential for all miners to enforce exactly the same rules about what counts as a valid block. If a client announces a block that half the network accepts and the other half rejects, the result could be a fork in the network. Different nodes could disagree about which transactions have occurred, potentially producing chaos.

Google will reportedly settle its case with U.S. authorities this week, after the company collected data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks with its Street View cars.

First reported by AllThingsD, the search giant will settle for around $7 million, which will be distributed among the attorneys general representing who more than 30 U.S. states. The agreement could be signed off on as soon as early this week, following a probe by state attorneys general in 2010.

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In 2010, Google admitted that it had collected fragments of personal and sensitive data from home wireless broadband networks in the U.S. and Europe while its Street View cars were on the road. It was part of wider efforts to determine the location of Wi-Fi networks to help build up a list of assisted location services for mobile users.